Amazon’s ever-increasing forays into the retail space saw, with Q3 sales up 34% year-on-year, in a quarter which saw the USD$13.7bn (£10.5bn), acquisition of Whole Foods.

Financial highlights

Net sales increased 34% to USD$43.7bn (£33.8bn) in the third quarter, compared with USD$32.7bn (£25bn) in third quarter 2016. Within this, USD$1.3bn (£1bn) of these sales came from Whole Foods Market, which Amazon acquired on August 28, 2017.

“In the last month alone, we’ve launched five new Alexa-enabled devices, introduced Alexa in India, announced integration with BMW, surpassed 25,000 skills, integrated Alexa with Sonos speakers, taught Alexa to distinguish between two voices, and more. Because Alexa’s brain is in the AWS cloud, her new abilities are available to all Echo customers, not just those who buy a new device”, said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “And it’s working – customers have purchased tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices, given Echo devices over 100,000 5-star reviews, and active customers are up more than 5x since the same time last year. With thousands of developers and hardware makers building new Alexa skills and devices, the Alexa experience will continue to get even better.”

Alexa highlights

Key to Amazon’s growth was the further development of their Alexa-enabled devices. Q3 has been an important time for developments here, with some of the most noteworthy including:

- Amazon introduced three new Echo devices: the all new Echo; Echo Plus; and Echo Spot

- The rapid growth of Alexa Skills store (Amazon’s take on the app store) now offers customers more than 25,000 skills

- Amazon announced that Alexa and Echo are coming to India and Japan, with an all-new Alexa experience designed from the ground up for Indian and Japanese customers

- Amazon introduced multi-room music, a new Alexa feature that lets you control and synchronise your music across multiple Echo devices in your home

- Alexa can now also distinguish between two voices, is integrated with Sonos speakers, and will soon be able to talk with Cortana

With Alexa controlling 70% of the voice-enabled speakers market in the US, and shopping through these devices on the up, these developments could prove key to the development of retail tech in the future.

Retail tech highlights

Aside from Alexa, Amazon has also been making more strides in the retail tech space:

- Amazon introduced Amazon Key, a new service exclusively for Prime members that enables in-home delivery and secure home access for guests and service appointments

- Amazon introduced a convenient way for teens to shop or stream content on the Amazon App with their own login while still keeping their parents informed

- Amazon Business launched Business Prime Shipping, offering unlimited free two-day shipping for multi-user business customers in the US and Germany

Add to this Amazon’s acquisition of Body Labs, a startup specialising in 3D body scanning and which will help the development of online virtual fitting rooms, and brick-and-mortar stores have real reasons to be concerned with Amazon’s moves this quarter.